After promising voters he would take a fresh look at U,S,-Cuba policy, President Joe Biden has delivered, 16 months into his term, ill-timed, mostly mediocre change that portends to help the Cuban people.
But consider the moment.
Biden is re-opening travel and expanding flights to the island that will inevitably turn into dollar-churning tourism at a time the ruthless regime is sentencing adolescents, musicians, artists and ordinary Cubans to long incarceration for nothing other than to peacefully demonstrate dissent.
Whatever happened to Biden holding the regime accountable for its crimes against the people during the historic July 11 protests and beyond?
No small act goes unpunished in Cuba.
A day or so ago, the regime approved a new penal code that establishes jail time and stiff fines for publicly criticizing a government official, in real life or virtually, in speech or writing.
It was likely a response to the clobbering on Twitter against Cuba’s appointed dictator, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and his wife after she called him “dictator of my heart.” Faced with widespread agreement that he was a dictator, the couple doubled down on the corny talk, revealing themselves clueless and out of touch.
Cubans used the opportunity to air grievances.
Intolerant Díaz-Canel responded as he always does, quashing people as if they were bothersome mosquitoes.
To this absurdly repressive scene, comes the Biden administration to reward the oppressor, the U.S. enemy still on a state-sponsors of terrorism list with support measures that amount to generous cash flow — and, in exchange for what, exactly?
To stem the mass exodus Cuba has unleashed to blackmail Biden into rushing to the negotiation table, as the administration has done?
Cuba has already profited from the migration big time.
By land, air and sea, the growing opposition seen during the protests has left the island and is still leaving. Once established abroad, they send remittances to the island — and Biden has now lifted restrictions on the amount.
Is Biden gifting Cuba travel dollars for the sake of pleasing the American left pressuring him, the one that turns a blind eye to repression, especially that of brave Black dissidents, for the sake of undertaking privileged visits to Commie Disneyland?
Or, is the goal simply to reverse Trump’s hard-line isolation — our liberal turn! — to opt for an Obama-styled engagement redux, a policy that despite some success, didn’t bring democratic change to Cuba either?
The Biden administration says that by allowing Americans to invest in private businesses in Cuba — a first in six decades — it’s giving the Cuban people “tools to pursue a life free from Cuban government oppression and to seek greater economic opportunities.”
But that only shows how little policymakers remember. If it were only that simple.
When President Barack Obama allowed Cuban Americans to do just that, and they invested, even bought properties, the Cuban government stepped in, shutting down some of these fledgling enterprises.
They don’t want people to be successful. It goes against dogma.
The regime always calls the shots. A line on a State Department position paper doesn’t guarantee Cubans what the administration says is its priority “their human rights and their political and economic well-being.”
Democrats who know how Cuba operates aren’t happy with Biden’s sudden change.
“I am dismayed to learn the Biden administration will begin authorizing group travel to Cuba through visits akin to tourism,” Sen. Bob Menendez, a Cuban American Democrat from New Jersey, said in a statement. “ ... those who still believe that increasing travel will breed democracy in Cuba are simply in a state of denial. For decades, the world has been traveling to Cuba and nothing has changed.”
He’s right. Just as the U.S. embargo hasn’t choked Cuba into political or economic change, neither did the American, European and Canadian tourist invasions.
Biden was expected to deliver a more thoughtful calibrated approach, but this isn’t it.
“For years, the United States foolishly eased travel restrictions, arguing millions of American dollars would bring about freedom and nothing changed,” Menendez added. “And as I warned then, the regime ultimately laughed off any promises of loosening its iron grip on the Cuban people and we ended up helping fund the machinery behind their continued oppression.”
Yeah, yeah, I get it.
Diplomacy and engagement are preferable to hopelessness.
President Donald Trump’s hard-line Cuba policy did nothing for Cubans on the island or in exile. Nothing for Venezuela nor Nicaragua. In fact, he harmed families already here and in the process of legal reunification when he stopped consular services in Havana and restricted immigration all around.
Biden now has restored the family reunification parole program and is increasing visa processing, so reestablishing regular migration channels, the saving grace to his policy announcement.
But righting Trump’s wrongs doesn't make Biden right in his approach to a new U.S.-Cuba policy.
I and many other Cuban Americans expected that Democrats, with the mixed results of Obama’s engagement policy, had learned something of value.
Apparently not.
Same old talking points are all I hear.
History shows that lofty aspirations of “empowering the Cuban people to determine their own future” turn into empty Cuban cigar smoke.
